Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

Pretty early on the morning following his arrival in Méricourt, Ned strolled up the easy slope leading to the lodge of the chateau, and found himself lingering over against the embowered gates with a queer barm of humour working upon a commixture of emotions in his breast. Now it seemed that his very neighbourhood to the Madonna of his memory was effecting a climatic change both within and without him. For the first, little runnels of irresponsible gaiety gushed in his veins; for the second, the weather, that had been indifferent fine during his journey, appeared to have broken all at once into full promise of summer. It was not, indeed, that his sympathies enlarged in the near presence of one who might hold herself as a little moon of desire. It was rather, perhaps, because in the one-time surrender of her very soul to his inspection, she had made of him a confederate in certain unspoken secrets, the knowledge of which was to him like a sense of proprietorship in a picturesque little country-seat. Yet here, it may be acknowledged, he indulged something a dangerous mood.

He stood a minute before passing through the gates. The warmth of a windless night still slept in the velvety eyes of the roadside flowers. Morning was heaping off its bed-linen of glistening clouds. From a chestnut-tree came the drowsy drawl of a yellow-hammer. A robin -- small fashionable idler of birds -- abandoned the problem of a fibrous seed and, flickering to a stump, discussed the stranger impertinently and with infinite society relish. Only the swifts were alert and busy, flashing, poising, diving under the eaves; thridding Ned's brain as they passed with a receding sound like that made by pebbles hopping over ice; seeming, in their flight of warp and woof, to be mending the pace set by the loitering day. Feeling their activity a rebuke, the visitor passed through the open gate.